Page:Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 31.djvu/18

x Street. In "Doctor Marigold" he introduces one of the many shrews whom he discriminated so finely. Mr. Gissing, in his excellent work on Dickens, has noticed his variety of shrews—Mrs. Snagsby, Mrs. Gargery, Mrs. Varden, Doctor Marigold's wife, and many others. Not one of the women named is a termagant by reason of drink; all are born to be so, and their case defies diagnosis—defies any treatment save that which Old Orlick applied with a hammer. There is a dipsomaniac shrew in Hard Times, but she is an exception, and comparatively intelligible. What is the quarrel of these women, with their husbands, their children, and the world? Dickens occasionally converts them. He converts Mrs. Gummidge and Mrs. Varden; but they are really beyond hope, short of a miracle. They are far from being unknown in any rank of life, but, in the less comfortable ranks, where there is no escape from them, they drive more men to drink than all the temperance lecturers and Local Options in the world can reclaim. Their husbands, in Dickens, do not adopt Petruchio's method; it is they, not the shrews, who are tamed. The mind broods hopelessly on this vast world-problem of the termagant, from Sarah Maryborough to Mrs. Doctor Marigold. That philosopher married on the briefest possible acquaintance. Prevention is better than cure. By careful observation the young might discover, not too late, whether attractive girls "have a temper;" and, by scientific study of woman in the kitten stage, man might leave the worse species of cats to perpetual maidenhood. But love is blind, or, at least, nascent passion is incapable of calm psychological study of the fair. Probably Dolly Varden grew up, like the wife of Mr. Boswell of Auchinleck, to be "a cat, and cross, like other wives." But Mrs. Boswell had provocations, while Mrs. Gargery and the rest had none.